Steps to Greater Website Profits
Giving Your Audience What it Wants
Too often web designers make a web site that only contain fluff. The problem is, visitors don’t come to your site to wast time, but usually have a distinct purpose. Don’t give them what they want, and they are gone!
So how do you appeal to these visitors? The easy answer, “Give them what they want.” The more important question you should ask is, “What do my visitors want?” To answer this question, you need to research three imperatives,
- Who are your visitors?
- What attracted them to your site originally?
- What do they want when they come to your site?
Once you know who your visitors are, what attracted them and what they are interested in, it becomes very simple to attract and retain them.
So now your wondering how you find this out about your visitors. luckily there are plenty of tactics to help you do this. First tactic, just ask them. Find a way to speak to them and ask them, you’ll find that this is a very helpful tool. Another tactic is using analysis software like Google Analytics. This software is easy to set up, and can tell you mounds of valuable information about your visitors. These are very helpful ways to learn more about your visitors, and in turn, helps you to provide unique and very valuable content to them.
Attract a Larger Targeted Audience
By catering to your customers needs you’ll see an increase in traffic from past visitors returning to your site. But by extending your marketing reach you can compound the number of visitors your site will recieve. In this section we talk about some of the most important traffic building methods used by professionals each day.
If you want immediate traffic now, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is the way to go. I offer a fair warning though, carelessness and lack of expertise can lead to a waste of your money. If you are new to PPC advertising we recommended to use a budget of $5 or less a day and use one of the most popular PPC systems: Google Adwords. One great benefit of using Google Adwords is that it connects directly to Google Analytics for extra detailed reporting. If done right, you’ll find PPC advertising as a very valuable tool in bringing in new sales every month.
If you like free relevant traffic, your going to love SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is about optimizing your web pages to become more search engine friendly, adding valuable and unique content and providing trusted links from within and outside of your website. The better ranked you can get your website in the search engines, the more free and relevant traffic you will receive.
Focus Your Website to Make Money
As mentioned earlier, you want to make it quick and easy for your visitors to get what they want. On the other side of the coin, you need to make it easy for your visitors to do what you want them to do. For example, why make them click through endless pages to sign up for a membership or newsletter? The easier you make it for your visitors to do what you want, the more they will do it.
Keep your website clean by only providing content that your customers want, and what you want your customers to do. Draw your visitors attention to a profitable action by using proper design such as color, contrast and varying fonts. Don’t forget to try new ways on different web pages to get your visitors attention.
The number of methods you can use to increase customer action seems enless. A few of the many worthy mentionables are branding, cross promotion, A/B testing and improving your call-to-action. Remember, the higher the rate of visitor to customer conversion the more revenue your website will receive.
Don’t Do it Alone
Too often we look to do our web design and marketing ourselves, and sometimes as a result, we lose more money than we save. Unless you’re dedicated and experienced in this area of specialties, you will find yourself beneath your competition when it comes to building an effective website.
Download Design
January 26th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
I think even more importantly than finding out who your visitors are is getting the right visitors in the first place. A lot of people bid on the wrong traffic, or SEO on the wrong traffic. This can be fatal to a website's success.